More than 100 organisations and academics have called on the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to retract a key report they claim downplays the impact of reduced meat intake on agricultural emissions.
In a joint letter seen by The Grocer, several high-profile groups – including Feedback, Changing Markets, Greenpeace, the European Environmental Bureau and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy – have accused the FAO’s Pathways Towards Lower Emissions report of containing “serious methodological errors”. The report, published at COP28 in December 2023, failed to acknowledge the mitigating effects that dietary shifting could have on climate change, according to the groups.
The letter follows recent accusations by the authors of two scientific papers heavily referenced in the FAO’s flagship report that the UN agency “distorted” their work.
Academics Dr Paul Behrens and Dr Matthew Hayek wrote to the FAO in April to express “dismay” that the paper “seriously distorts” their scientific research. They called for a retraction and re-issuing of the report with “more appropriate sources selected and methodological errors rectified”.
Behrens and Hayek concluded the FAO report “systematically underestimates” the opportunity of sustainable lower-meat and dairy diets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions compared with a business-as-usual 2050 scenario.
The paper estimated that the emissions mitigation potential of dietary change was only 0.19-0.53 Gt CO2-equivalent per year. Behrens and Hayek estimate that this is between six to 40 times lower than the actual potential.
Martin Bowman, senior policy and campaigns manager at environmental group Feedback, said the FAO had made “serious and embarrassing errors” in its report.
“These mistakes are a stain on the FAO’s reputation, unless rectified. All these errors systematically underestimate the emissions reduction potential of lower-meat and dairy diets.”
He added that “people will rightly ask whether FAO staff have simply been incompetent, or whether this indicates systematic bias against dietary change”, particularly “in light of recent allegations from ex-FAO staffers that they have been ostracised and censored for their work on dietary change”.
Media reports last year cited former FAO officials who claimed they had been sidelined and censored by the FAO following lobbying from high livestock-producing companies and countries.
The letter’s signatories also argued most of the Pathways report findings around the impact of shifting to a more plant-based diet were unfounded or outdated, and went against several other recent studies from different global bodies such as the International Panel on Climate Change.
The IPCC backs research estimating that a flexitarian diet (75% of meat and dairy replaced by cereals and pulses, with only one portion of red meat a week) would reduce global emissions by approximately 5 GtCO2-eq per year – over nine times higher than the FAO’s estimate.
According to the letter’s signatories, the “significant methodological errors in the FAO’s Pathways report” include:
- Double counting meat emissions to 2050, mixing different baseline years in its analysis, and including emissions from increases in vegetable, fruit and nut consumption which are unrelated to substituting meat and dairy in diets.
- In addition, the FAO makes several inappropriate modelling choices, such as ignoring the potential carbon sequestration from land spared by dietary change and conflating sustainable healthy diets with nationally recommended diets (NRDs) – most of which do not factor sustainability into their design – rather than using models like the EAT-Lancet diet.
- It also uses NRDs, which have since become obsolete as many countries have since updated theirs to recommend lower meat consumption. For instance, Spanish Guidelines from 2022 now recommend 0-3 meat portions/week and German guidelines from 2024 now recommend no more than 300g meat per week.
The letter also echoed Behrens’ and Hayek’s calls for it to be retracted and reissued “only once the methodological errors it contains have been rectified, drawing on more appropriate and up-to-date studies and following engagement in serious dialogue with independent academics and experts from civil society”.
The letter also recommends that the release of the FAO’s 2050 Roadmap should “be delayed until it has adopted “more robust, inclusive and transparent processes”.
Food and agriculture accounts for one third of global greenhouse gas emissions. At the UN climate summit last year, 159 countries committed to include food and agriculture into national climate mitigation and adaptation plans.
Nusa Urbancic, CEO of Changing Markets Foundation, said: “The debate around the climate impact of food and farming is extremely polarised and riddled with industry-funded disinformation.
“For this reason, it’s of paramount importance that international organisations, such as the FAO, present impartial and scientifically robust reports that can serve governments as a guide for climate action in the sector.
“We are concerned about the lack of rigour in the Pathways report and we are convinced that the FAO can and must do better.”
The $70 trillion global investor network FAIRR has also previously said the “concerns raised by the authors [Behrens and Hayek] extend” to the 2050 Roadmap report, and that it expected the UN-FAO to “provide a substantive response to the issues raised” and “make adjustments to their analyses if and as needed”.
“The highest level of academic integrity and impartiality must be maintained by the UN-FAO” for the result to be scientifically sound, it added.
The Grocer has contacted the FAO for comment.
No comments yet